2. Data rules the modern world. Banks need data, military needs data, scientists need data, & physicians need data.
Sometimes there’s good reasons to hide data, during military conflicts or for commercial exploitation, but there’s no excuse for it during a major pandemic.
3. CCA legislation imposes duty to inform the British public regarding civil emergencies. We get that judges don’t want to unduly fetter the executive during a crisis, but a crisis is when our constitution is tested. This is a rare opportunity to clarify legal effects of the CCA.
4. Plus there will likely be a 2nd wave and future pandemics. Therefore imperative that we have clarity on exactly what information a democratic govt must reveal to the British people when their businesses, housing, education and indeed their lives are put at risk.
5. We also believe that a democratically elected government has a general duty of transparency under Freedom of Information legislation.
We need independent scientific scrutiny of the data to identify & explore novel solutions to this unprecedented public health challenge.
6. For all these reasons, we hope that @LeighDay_Law, @TomRHickman & our formidable legal team will establish transparency regarding UK preparedness for #Covid19.
Political advantage must not outweigh scientific considerations during a pandemic – there’s just too much at stake.
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1/4 Three Palestinian Christians challenge the Empire's false justifications for Occupation, then Apartheid and now Genocide.
Revd Munther Isaac makes a simple demand: "Those who commit war crimes must be held accountable".
Full speech here:
2/4 Shireen Awwad Hilal is a Christian leader from Bethlehem whose Christian family - like so many Palestinians - have been dehumanised and killed.
Her words: "We are not only thinking of peace, we are thinking of justice for the people of Palestine".
3/4 Finally, Samuel Munayer is a young Palestinian theologian who studied politics under @pappe54.
Listen to his remarkable dissection of [Palestinian] Liberation Theology: "Colonialism is a structure of sinfulness. And if that is a structure of sinfulness, our mandate is to be in revolution against it".
1/8 This letter from 30 British healthcare professionals asks @Keir_Starmer & @DavidLammy to stop providing arms to the Israeli regime, but it also provides objective first-hand clinical accounts of war crimes and thus puts British ministers on notice – because @ICJPalestine has said it will refer them to the ICC and British war crimes unit if they continue to facilitate breaches of international humanitarian law (IHL). icjpalestine.com/2024/08/22/30-…
2/8 What most people don’t understand is how the multi-national highly-networked conglomerate arms industry is configured to specifically protect Israel, and how deeply embedded British industry is within that configuration. Most people in the arms industry are very shy of speaking candidly for obvious reasons, but some are not, and I’d like to share what I’ve learned.
Let’s say you’re working for a subsidiary of one of Europe’s largest manufacturing companies in Manchester, and you book a sale of aircraft braking systems to a company in Gloucestershire. In order to make that sale, you’ll have to go through a compliance questionnaire. Your sale might be between two companies selling a product which has no relationship to Israel, but as you make your way through the compliance questions, you come across a very strange question: please confirm you are not selling products to a company which has a policy of not selling to Israel?
3/8 But why might you come across specific anti-BDS provisions within a compliance framework if you’re selling components which have no relationship with Israel? This all goes back to the interconnected conglomerate nature of the worldwide arms industry and its domination by the USA. Besides anti-BDS laws in most U.S. states, national federal legislation ie the USA’s Export Control Reform Act of 2018 prohibits boycotts of U.S. allies if those boycotts are promoted or imposed by foreign countries. Theoretically this applies to any U.S. ally but in practice the US Department of Commerce (specifically its Office of Anti-Boycott) focuses almost exclusively on penalising any company which dares to boycott Israel. bis.doc.gov/index.php/all-…
1. The "statutory instrument" plan to regulate Physician Associates by @GMCuk isnt going to wash. Stat instruments are delegated powers to implement legislation - cant go against Parliament's stated purpose to regulate "the medical profession".
@TheBMA @EveryDoctorUK @TheDA_UK
2. You'd have to cross out paragraph after paragraph of the Medical Act to extend it to Physician Associates, for instance its stated remit is to regulate doctors who have passed rigorous medical qualifications. They're basically writing a new Act, stat instruments cant do that.
3. BMA should challenge this in court, but GMC should also be doing more to protect patients. Physician associates have a valid role to play in healthcare delivery, but they're an American import and the risks to patients are well-described in the USA. reliasmedia.com/articles/14817…
1/5 Wonky logic here. It's not like we’re withdrawing labour from a factory-owner and decreasing his company profits. We’re withdrawing our labour from a service which its owners actually want to fail. Standard economic strategies therefore become inoperative. https://t.co/2DkMk82bhc
2/5 Govt is *happy* that NHS Trusts have forked out £1 billion, that waiting lists are growing - this allows them to accelerate transfer to private sector and predictably blame *greedy* consultants. bbc.co.uk/news/health-64…
3/5 No electoral incentive for Tories to capitulate either because Labour Party leadership is funded by private health and they want NHS to fail too.
More NHS fails, more cash they can funnel to their donors to "fix" the problem by diverting public money into private profit.
1/14 Insurance models of healthcare (European-style of course, we'd never let USA get near NHS!) have been proposed in UK for decades. Difference is that NHS is now on its knees, so arguments for insurance are getting louder. But let's look at @KateAndrs position in more detail.
2/14 Firstly, insurance adds layer of bureaucracy which is intrinsically more costly than tax-funded healthcare. Insurance costs include actuarial analysis, cost of billing, cost of collecting, legal costs, admin, etc.
3/14 Secondly, insurance schemes deliver profit by excluding high-cost customers. But Nobel prizewinners eg Arrow & Sen explained insurance companies can't predict healthcare costs for patients accurately, vitiating the efficiency of market competition. They have to over-charge.
3/9 Even after all the deaths, important questions remain unanswered. Govt *definitely* has secret triage policy - who'll be chosen to live & who'll be allowed to die if NHS overwhelmed by pandemic?
What kind of democracy keeps policy like that secret?